Present Tense is The Swaddle Team's stream of consciousness response to the world's madness.

A London-bound aircraft crashed in Ahmedabad. How many days before the horror subsides and the Boeing memes begin? Last week it was at a stadium. A few days ago it was on a local train. Today it is an airplane. The sheer lack of control, not only over our lives but also over our deaths, is moving past being overwhelming to perhaps just irrelevant.

Are we allowed to question the authorities about this yet? Weeks before the crash, Boeing agreed to a $1.1 billion payout to the U.S. Department of Justice to avoid prosecution for two previous crashes, both of which killed over 300 people. The aircraft manufacturer also ignored — which is putting it lightly — whistleblower complaints about the 787 Dreamliners in particular, demanding they all be grounded. One told the BBC that workers under time-pressure were forced to fit substandard parts into aircrafts. These whistleblowers died soon after.

In other words, all this may have been prevented. Let's also talk about the local trains in Mumbai while we're at it: Nearly 2,500 people died on the Mumbai suburban railway tracks; amounting to nearly seven deaths per day. But in 2023, the central government's railway safety funds were diverted toward executing railway projects instead.

All of the deaths from the last week have already been filed away as tragic accidents. A continuous stream of thoughts and prayers has issued from the mouths of leaders and industrialists toward survivors and families of the victims.

Meanwhile, this just in: Israel is launching attacks on Iran.

Among all the death and destruction, we are also embroiled in a heated debate about Sabrina Carpenter's new album cover, in which she's on all fours and has her hair in somebody's grip. Is she taking feminism back? Is she reclaiming her sexuality? Is my favourite song a feminist anthem? Is my cab service an anti-capitalist platform? Is my airline ethnically diverse? Is this flyover inclusive? Is the construction company anti-capitalist? Is my sports shoe woke? So many burning questions.

Does New York's mayoral race have the answers? No. But does it have Bollywood references? Yes. Is Zohran Kwame Mamdani the most exciting thing that has happened to politics? Also yes. Is he any of our business? Probably not, unless you're reading from New York City. The pop culture-ification of politicians, however, is a phenomenon that's here to stay, which is why we know him as Mira Nair's son and the mayoral candidate that used Bollywood in his campaign. If you're reading this from India, tell us the truth: were you, or were you not, aware of the fact that your city too has a mayor? Drop their names in the comments when you see this on Instagram. Make civic awareness sexy again (even if your mayor isn't Zohran Mamdani)! Pressure your local authorities to include more pop culture references in their construction death-traps.

A few lighter updates: the UX designers at Apple seemed to have had the bright idea that transparent icons are better than opaque ones. They're calling it "liquid glass," maybe because it sounds sexier? This, like most other Apple upgrades over the years, is yet another sign that we're living in postmodern hell. The sleekification of everything. The hyper-optimization of surfaces over depth. To quote a banger from Donna Haraway's A Cyborg Manifesto, "The silicon chip is a surface for writing; it is etched in molecular scales disturbed only by atomic noise, the ultimate interference for nuclear scores."

Meaning the smaller the box into which we are able to fit our whole lives, the further we believe we are going in terms of civilizational advancement. Our devices get tinier and more efficient, more minimalist. Meta's AI chief said that smartphones will become obsolete in a decade or two and that we'll have intelligent glasses and bracelets that interact with smart surfaces instead. As if it wasn't bad enough to have to connect your fridge to WiFi these days.

On the other hand, however, aesthetics seem to be moving in the opposite direction. The pop girls have new songs and new music videos out now and they all look like grainy home videos. Sabrina Carpenter's "Manchild" and Addison Rae's "Fame Is a Gun," and Charli XCX's belated music video "Party 4 u" look like they could all exchange music videos and retain the essence of what they're going for, which is low-key, lo-fi, low-maintenance, low resolution. A visual cue to signal that you're not taking it seriously is a hot commodity. Like so many of these things, it was probably Kim Kardashian who pre-empted this analog-oriented aesthetic when she did a weird, surreal music video of her cover of "Santa Baby" last Christmas. You could say that it was a comment on the manufacture of authenticity, on the fact that culture is cyclical and nostalgia is a dark force that resurfaces when the rest of society is not very healthy. Come to think of it, then, "liquid glass" isn't new, it is in fact very old. It's Windows desktop old.

Why do we refuse to let things go? Housefull 5 is apparently a movie that's out right now. When was there a 3 and 4? India's relationship with sexuality remains as closeted as ever: acceptable when cloaked in crude innuendo and humour, unacceptable when expressed for its own sake. Good old, same old, old old.

This week we also had an epic game of tennis: the French Open final between Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner that turned into the second-longest Grand Slam final at five hours, 29 minutes. The Athletic called it cinema in a piece breaking down the nutritional requirements to sustain such a bout of sport — another reminder of the fact that everything in the world is hyper-optimized to machine-like perfection. But what is sport if not a curiosity about the human body's endurance during impossibly high stakes?

It is difficult, then, to accept the fact that we know how to push the biological limits of a person's physical capacity and even life-span, even as we seemingly have lesser and lesser regard for human life. We have probably never been better positioned, as a human race, to end wars, poverty, hunger, and sickness as we currently are. And yet, people die everyday in avoidable local railway accidents, and Gaza continues to starve, and nobody is even allowed to do anything about it. What is the point of liquid glass design and AI roombas if we aren't solving the rest of it? Life today is a race to compress a single life into smaller and smaller containers, not realizing -- or perhaps, already having realized -- that the value of a life inevitably gets smaller too.

But if everything is meaningless and life is supposed to carry on amid unprecedented exposure to death, devastation, and despair at all hours of the day, we might as well have some pleasing things to look at too. Hence the resurgence of music videos as a concept. Hence the prioritization of UX design over functionality. Hence the Bollywood throwbacks in a political candidate's campaign. Everything, everywhere optimized for a little dopamine hit before things suck again.

It is getting harder and harder to make sense of the world, of the news, of all this death taking place unrelentingly alongside everything else. Life on this Earth is not frightening because people die so much; it is frightening because of our inability to care, our inertia to do something about it, even though we can. We can spend more money on safer trains, safer planes, bigger stadiums, bigger hospitals, better hospitals, better schools, bigger forests, better ecosystems, better roads, better housing. Everything, all this, can be better. And yet, it isn't. There isn't a thing we can do except to watch it all get worse on our tiny, beautiful, liquid glass screens. But if history is any indication, far higher odds have been beaten in favour of changing things. Maybe we're approaching a point where it isn't a question of if, but when.